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Updated: May 5, 2025
For otherwise perhaps I might never have known you." Herminia's heart gave a delicious bound. She was a woman, and therefore she was glad he should speak so. She was a woman, and therefore she shrank from acknowledging it. But she looked him back in the face tranquilly, none the less on that account, and answered with sweet candor, "Thank you so much, Mr. Merrick."
He would be his Herminia's guardian angel. He would use her love for him, for he knew she loved him, as a lever to egg her aside from these slippery moral precipices. He mistook the solid rock of ethical resolution he was trying to disturb with so frail an engine. The fulcrum itself would yield far sooner to the pressure than the weight of Herminia's uncompromising rectitude.
Day dawned, but no light came with it to his troubled spirit. The more he thought of this dilemma, the more profoundly he shrank from the idea of allowing himself to be made into the instrument for what the world would call, after its kind, Herminia's shame and degradation.
Miss Smith-Waters prayed nightly for Herminia's "conversion," yet not without an uncomfortable suspicion, after all, that Herminia had very little indeed to be "converted" from. Other people also got to know her by degrees; an editor's wife; a kind literary hostess; some socialistic ladies who liked to be "advanced;" a friendly family or two of the Bohemian literary or artistic pattern.
The father spread his two palms in front of him with demonstrative openness. "As you will," he answered. "My time is much engaged. I expect a patient at a quarter past ten. You must be brief, please." Alan made one more effort. In a very earnest voice, he began to expound to his father Herminia's point of view. Dr. Merrick listened for a second or two in calm impatience.
Herminia's lip curled an almost imperceptible curl as she answered gravely, "I don't think you quite understand my plans in life, Mrs. Dewsbury. It isn't my present intention to GO IN for anybody." But Mrs. Dewsbury shook her head. She knew the world she lived in.
He took it for granted that of course they must dwell under one roof with one another. But that simple ancestral notion, derived from man's lordship in his own house, was wholly adverse to Herminia's views of the reasonable and natural. She had debated these problems at full in her own mind for years, and had arrived at definite and consistent solutions for every knotty point in them.
Some sense of personal continuity restrains me still. It is the Nemesis of our youth; we can't go back in our later life on the holier and purer ideals of our girlhood." "Then you say no definitely?" Harvey Kynaston asked. Herminia's voice quivered. "I say no definitely," she answered; "unless you can consent to live with me on the terms on which I lived with Dolly's father."
To rivet the attention of friends on bride and bridegroom is to offend against the most delicate susceptibilities of modesty. From all such hateful practices, Herminia's pure mind revolted by instinct. She felt that here at least was the one moment in a woman's history when she would shrink with timid reserve from every eye save one man's, when publicity of any sort was most odious and horrible.
Something so frank and fearless shone in Herminia's glance, as her eye met his, that Alan, who respected human freedom above all other qualities in man or woman, was taken on the spot by its perfect air of untrammelled liberty. Yet it was subtle and beautiful too, undeniably beautiful.
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